Ron Numbers

Ronald Numbers is an historian of science and medicine at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the author of "The
Creationists", a definitive history of the creationist movement,
and also the co-editor of "God and Nature", a seminal
collection of essays on the historical relationship between science
and religion.

QUESTION: Could you tell us, have science and religion always
been in conflict?

MR. NUMBERS: Throughout most of modern history science and
religion have not been in a state of conflict. That has emerged,
at least the perception of a conflict, has emerged roughly within
the last 130 years or so. Certainly, this didn't occur during
the so-called scientific revolution of the 17th Century, when
by and large science and religion were fused in a common enterprise
called natural philosophy.

In the 18th Century, especially towards the end of the 18th
century, we see much more of a concerted effort to try to separate
these two and to pit one against the other. This picks up speed
in the 19th Century, and in the last third of the 19th Century
especially, there was a great deal of publicity given to the notion
or warfare or conflict between science and religion.

QUESTION: Could you explain how that warfare model arose?

MR. NUMBERS: In the early 19th Century, there was a sense among
some parties that science and religion might be in conflict on
certain issues. But the public, by and large, believed that science
could be harmonized with religion. After all, one of the most
prevailing models was called the "two books", that God
had revealed himself in the Book of Nature as he had in the Scriptures.
And that since God was the author of both books, it was impossible
that the two should conflict. Only erroneous interpretations of
one or the other would lead to conflict.

The notion of conflict between science and religion became
especially prominent in the last third of the 19th Century with
the appearance of two best selling books. One by John William
Draper, a medical school professor in New York City, and the other
by the president of Cornell University, Andrew Dixon White. Andrew
Dixon White published the fullest treatment of this in 1896 in
a two-volume work called "A History of the Warfare of Science
with Theology in Christendom". He tried in that work to identify
the source of conflict as dogmatic theology. Whereas Draper really
focused on the Catholic Church, and praised the Protestants for
having been the good guys in the history of science and religion.

QUESTION: So, Draper and White painted a picture of science
and religion in conflict. What effect did that have on the general
public?

MR. NUMBERS: Well, these books were very widely read. Draper's
was the most popular in Appleton's International Science Series.
White's remains in print today in many, many languages. And so,
many people just came to assume that science and religion were
in perpetual conflict. Now, this aided certain people who wanted
to see religion, especially organized religion, as an impediment
to scientific progress. Needless to say, many Christians denounced
such insidious works, and they rejected the argument that even
organized theology had largely been in opposition to scientific
development.

QUESTION: These books both came out after the publication of
Darwins book on evolution. How did they treat that subject?

MR. NUMBERS: Although these books appeared in the wake of the
publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species",
they devoted relatively little space to that topic. But they did
coincide with the publication of a number of controversial works
on evolution and religion specifically. It's a convention today
to believe that evolution precipitated a major conflict with the
religious community. But if you look at the participants at the
time, it was a much murkier situation in which, in the United
States at least, the leading advocates of Darwin's theory were,
themselves, active religionists.

QUESTION: So was there a diversity of responses by religious
people to Darwins theory of evolution?

MR. NUMBERS: The appearance of "The Origin of Species"
- at least in the United States - elicited a great diversity of
responses, and the responses did not conform to what we might
expect looking back. For example, Darwin's foremost advocate in
the United States, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, was a Presbyterian.
He accepted eveolution in general, but he made exceptions for
the origin of humans, and for the origin of complex organs such
as eyes, these he attributed to divine intervention. There was
in fact a wide range of opinions.

QUESTION: So, it's not true then that there was just the scientific
community on one side, and the religious community on the other?

MR. NUMBERS: Anything but. Most scientists in the United States
in the late 19th Century were, themselves, believing Christians,
and the ones who accepted evolution, and that would be the majority,
simply took it as God's method of creation. So, although they
may have wrestled with issues such as the mechanism of evolution,
most of them didn't think it was necessary to reject evolution
in order to salvage their Christian beliefs.

QUESTION: And what about the Christian community? Is it true
that many Christians in the late 19th Century were radically opposed
to evolution?

MR. NUMBERS: We know very little about the reaction of the
masses of Americans to evolution in the late 19th Century. But
I feel confident in saying that the overwhelming number rejected
evolution, and especially any implication that humans were related
to monkey ancestors.

QUESTION: What about theologians?

MR. NUMBERS: Within the community of theologians and ministers
who spoke out publicly on this issue, opinion was rather divided,
as one might expect, from conservatives who rejected evolution
in any form to liberals who embraced evolution as an example of
how God effected the creation. And for these people to embrace
evolution necessitated a change in their very conception of God
from a transcendent being out there to a notion of God as being
imminant in the world.These liberals often went to great lengths
to convince the public that evolution could be harmonized with
traditional religious views and values.

QUESTION: I'd like to move on, to talk about the Galileo case.
Many people have a mythology that during his trial there was somebody
down in the basement stoking the pyre and oiling the rack - that
he was in imminent danger of losing his life. Is this a true representation
of the case?

MR. NUMBERS: Contrary to common myth, Galileo suffered very
little abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church. He was never
tortured, he never faced death. In fact, he was never imprisoned.
His penalty was house arrest at a pleasant villa on the outskirts
of Florence, Italy.

Galileo's problems with the church stemmed far less from his
astronomical and physical views than from his lack of diplomacy,
and from his impertinence in trying to instruct the church on
how to interpret Scriptures, as some Protestants had attempted
to do in the previous century. Furthermore, in writing his controversial
book, Galileo had the impertinence to attribute the Pope's views
to a simple-minded character named Simplicius. This Pope [Urban
VIII] had once been a patron of Galileo's and had supported his
scientific efforts, so such a lack of diplomacy turned even the
Pope against his one-time friend.

QUESTION: When the trial actually happened, what could have
been the result if Galileo had refused to recant his view that
the earth revolved around the sun? Was he in danger of death?

MR. NUMBERS: Well, it's hard to write counter-factual history
about what might have happened if, but there seems no reason to
believe that Galileo at any point faced the threat of death. There
was never any indication in the court records of death being a
possible penalty, and no other scientists were put to death for
their scientific views.

QUESTION: Is it the case then that there had been no scientists
killed for their scientific views?

MR. NUMBERS: I can think of no scientist who ever lost his
life for his scientific views.

QUESTION: Does the Galileo case represent a fundamental break
in relations between science and religion?

MR. NUMBERS: Looking back on the Galileo affair, it's tempting
to see it representing a fundamental break in the relations between
science and religion, but I don't think it represented anything
of the sort. In fact, at the time, it aroused relatively little
interest. It was only in later decades and centuries that it came
to be seen as a representation of what supposedly happens to scientific
pioneers when they dare to try to correct the church's teachings.

QUESTION: Lets move back to the question of evolution. What
do you think is the historical significance of the Pope's recent
statement that evolution is more than a hypothesis?

MR. NUMBERS: I think the Pope's recent statement on evolution
- that it is more than a hypothesis - is merely an historical
footnote. I can't imagine that many Catholics were waiting to
hear the Pope say this any more than they were waiting to hear
the Vatican say that the church was wrong in the Galileo case
hundreds of years ago.

QUESTION: Why is it just a footnote?

MR. NUMBERS: I think it's a footnote because I don't think
it changes much. Catholic institutions of higher learning were
already teaching evolution. Most educated Catholics I know have
believed in evolution, and so it's difficult for me to imagine
that this will represent a fundamental change of attitudes even
within Catholicism. And outside Catholicism it's simply a curiosity
that the leader of one of the worlds major religions would come
out in the late 20th Century and feel it necessary to say that
evolution is more than a hypothesis.

QUESTION: Do you think it has a value in terms of making religion
seem more acceptable?

MR. NUMBERS: I don't think it even helps at a public relations
level because it simply reminded people all around the world who
read this announcement that the Roman Catholic Church, more than
100 years after the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species",
had still not gotten past the place of regarding evolution as
a mere hypothesis.

QUESTION: One of the big fights in the United States is often
over whether evolution should be taught in shcools or not. So
its still clearly a problem with some religious believers.
Why do you think thats so?

MR. NUMBERS: In the United States, roughly one-half of Americans
continue to believe in the special creation of the first human
beings no more than 10,000 years ago. There are many reasons why
they do this. But for most of them, they don't see their embracing
of special creation as a rejection of science. They handle this
by arguing that evolution is so speculative, so hypothetical that
it doesn't deserve the good name of science, and they are told
by fundamentalists - especially by "creation scientists"
- that there is an alternative model of the history of life on
Earth that is as scientific as the one that evolutionists have
created. [[Editors note - for more on "creation science"
see the Evolution section entry on Creationism]]

QUESTION: So, in a certain sense, doesn't this represent some
sort of divide between religion and science?

MR. NUMBERS: To me, the struggle in the late 20th Century between
creationists and evolutionists does not represent another battle
between science and religion because rarely do creationists display
hostility towards science. If you read their literature, you'll
rarely come across an anti-scientific notion. They love science.
They love what science can do. They hate the fact that science
has been hijacked by agnostics and atheists to offer such speculative
theories as organic evolution. So, they don't see themselves as
being antagonistic to science any more than many of the advocates
of evolution - those who see evolution as God's method of creation
- view themselves as hostile to Christianity.

QUESTION: In fact, creation scientists are themselves very
concerned to make their views scientific. Could you explain their
idea of "flood geology"?

MR. NUMBERS: The primary theory underlying creation science
is something called flood geology, which attributes virtually
all of the geological fossil bearing strata to Noah's flood, a
timsespan of about one year. Now, this means that all of the history
of life on Earth can be telescoped down to a mere six, seven,
or ten thousand years. The most vocal advocates of this position
have been scientists themselves, especially in recent years, and
they see this as an alternative scientific model, rather than
as a refutation of science.

QUESTION: Are scientists in general atheistic?

MR. NUMBERS: The public often gets the impression that most
scientists are non-believers. But, that's not true. Just within
the past year the journal Nature published a study that revealed
even today roughly the same proportion of scientists believe in
God as did 75 years ago. [The figure is almost 40%]

QUESTION: So would you say it is a mythology that people have
that science and religion are enemies?

MR. NUMBERS: I think there's a powerful mythology today suggesting
that science and religion are enemies, and it is fueled by some
of the most public and popular of scientists, such as Carl Sagan
in the United States, or Richard Dawkins in Great Britain, who
have gone out of their way on occasions to present that view.

QUESTION: How do you think that the current dialogs betweeen
scientists and religionists fit into the history we've had over
the centuries between science and religion? Are we going to see
a coming together again - possibly back to the happy days of the
17th Century?

MR. NUMBERS: In recent years there's been a lot of activity,
focusing on the relationship between science and religion, often
with an eye towards showing the harmony between science and religion.
As a historian it's hard for me to say what fruit this effort
will bear. But, I guess that I'm somewhat sceptical about much
of importance coming out of it. I think most people are fairly
entrenched in their opinions. Whether it's their dedication to
fundamentalist Christianity, or atheistic science, and I think
that it will be very hard for those who are advocating the harmony
of science and religion to make the sort of progress that they
want.